The Winning Streak Is Real. The Efficiency Collapse Is Realer.
Denver is 9-1 in its last ten games, and the box score will tell you a contender has found its footing at exactly the right moment. I'd like to direct your attention to a different number: 39.5. That's Jamal Murray's field goal percentage over that same ten-game stretch — down from 48.4% on the season — while he's taking three more shots per game than his baseline. The Nuggets are winning despite this, not because of it. That distinction matters enormously when the calendar flips to playoff basketball.
The pattern with Murray is the one that should keep Denver's coaching staff up at night, because they've seen it before. Over these last ten games, his shot attempts climbed to 20.0 per game from a 17.4 baseline, and his efficiency cratered by nearly nine percentage points. More shots, far worse results. Anyone who watched what happened to this offense in a playoff series a couple springs ago — when Murray's volume spiked and his accuracy evaporated at the worst possible moment — knows exactly what this trend line looks like when it reaches its conclusion.
Nikola Jokic's numbers are telling the same story in a lower register. His attempts are up to 19.7 per game from 17.6, and his shooting percentage has slid from 54.4% to 47.7% over the last ten games. For most players, 47.7% is a fine number. For Jokic — a three-time MVP whose entire offensive architecture is built on surgical efficiency — it represents a meaningful deterioration. When the league's most efficient scorer is grinding for possessions rather than flowing through them, something structural is wrong with how the offense is generating looks.
The structural problem has a name: there is no one else. Behind Jokic at center, Denver carries essentially nothing — the depth chart at that position begins and ends with him, which means every foul, every fatigue decision, every minute of rest the coaching staff tries to manufacture comes at direct cost to the offense. Jonas Valanciunas has been asked to absorb more of that burden lately, and the results are predictable — his efficiency has dropped sharply as his role has expanded beyond what he was built to handle. The Nuggets' close-game record — 16-13 in games decided by five points or fewer — adds another layer of concern. That 55% mark trails their overall winning percentage by a significant margin, and playoff basketball is almost entirely close games.
What makes this genuinely dangerous, rather than merely concerning, is the feedback loop it creates. When Jokic and Murray are laboring to manufacture efficient shots, the supporting cast — Tim Hardaway Jr., Cameron Johnson, Christian Braun — gets pulled into tighter defensive attention because defenses don't have to respect the two stars as much. Aaron Gordon, who has been one of Denver's most reliable contributors when healthy, has played only 42 games. The margin for error on a roster this top-heavy was always thin. Right now, the two players carrying the entire weight are showing signs of strain at the exact moment the weight is about to get heavier.
My read is this: the winning streak is not a lie, but it is a partial truth. Denver has earned the third seed and deserves credit for finishing strong. What the scoreboard obscures is that Jokic and Murray are currently operating well below their season-long efficiency levels while taking on more offensive responsibility than usual — and that the supporting infrastructure around them remains too thin to absorb the slack if either player's shooting continues to regress. The Nuggets have been here before. The question isn't whether they recognize the warning signs. It's whether they have enough depth to do anything about them.